


Campaign Rules

by Thimblerig



Series: Musketeer Shorts [11]
Category: The Musketeers (2014)
Genre: Casual Sex, Infidelity, M/M, Mild Smut, Scenes from a war, Situational Sexuality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-30
Updated: 2016-12-30
Packaged: 2018-09-13 10:10:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9119068
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thimblerig/pseuds/Thimblerig
Summary: The third time he presses a kiss to your temple, after. The fourth time, you return the favour.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Look At You Now](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2371865) by [breathtaken](https://archiveofourown.org/users/breathtaken/pseuds/breathtaken). 



> Some consent issues in the second section. They're resolved later but in rl it's infinitely better to ask _first._ Loosely inspired by “Look at You Now” by breathtaken.

It's different, on campaign. This is brought home to you, very clearly, the first time you hear Athos curse out a mule-driver in lowest gutter French for letting his charges’ feet rot. Your new Captain switches to filthy Italian, then German, then Latin. What you can make out through the bare scrape of a childhood education scorches your ears. His breath steams in the chill air; his gloved hand is firm on the mule rope; he strokes the beast’s nose, oddly gentle, as he drives the muleteer to stuttering weeping.

Behind you, Porthos laughs silently. “Campaign rules,” he says. “Everything gets a bit filthy. An’ if the baggage animals can't walk, we don't eat. After that...” He mimes putting a gun to his head, makes a soft _pew_ sound with his lips.  

**

The first time is a surprise, more or less. It was the first day you'd led a charge, rallying the green troops behind you, your heavy cavalry sabers held out straight from your shoulders as you rode in a thunder of dust and wind. It had been warm work, but good. They'd toasted you in the officers’ mess and that had been good, too. You turn again in the bed you've been sharing with Porthos, crowded two-a-room in the inn your regiment took over as a billet.  It was a good day, but you cannot sleep, flooded with choleric and melancholic humours battling each other.

Porthos grumbles beside you - it's rather like sharing a bed with a friendly bear - and turns on his side. “Hang on,” he mutters.

He pats you lightly on the shoulder, as if soothing a restive horse, then your hip. Humming low in his throat he slips a warm hand into your drawers and wraps around you, and a sigh you didn’t know you'd been holding falls out of you. It's different from when you touch yourself - a wider grasp, a different distribution of callus. After a pause he works you off, gentle and efficient, and it's no time at all before you spend in his hand. He cleans up with a handkerchief then turns on his other side and falls asleep without a word said. You do, too, your forehead tucked against his shoulder blades, and don't recall any dreams.   

**

Porthos and Athos are sitting on their heels by a campfire in the temporary quarters, sketching a map of the battlefield again and - well, it amounts to gossip - discussing the temperament of various commanders, rumours, possible lines of attack… Athos pauses, stick still in hand, and stands politely - he's still muffled in his grubby scarf so it must have been early in the war - and tolerates a burly man with flaming red hair and squinty eyes seizing him by the shoulders and kissing him soundly on both cheeks. “D’Essart,” he says, almost warmly. There's a faint hint of a smile hiding in his scarred lips.

“Athos my friend, congratulations on your promotion, Treville finally tricked you into responsibility, eh?”

“So it would appear.”

“I would stay to eat with you but there's no time. I'll trade you a keg of Armagnac for the loan of your marksman for a week.”

The wood Porthos had been feeding to the fire splinters in his hand.

D’Essart’s face falls. “Aramis isn't de-?”

“Might as well be,” says Porthos, glowering.

“No,” says Athos.   

**

“I love my wife,” you blurt out after the second time. It's morning, you're riding out to scout what won't be Spanish territory much longer, and breath steams as you pull up your horses on the brow of the hill.

“The way I see it,” Porthos answers slowly, patting the shoulder of his horse soothingly, “love means being responsible. And sometimes responsibility means not bringing an unexpected kid home, or any other gifts from a nice girl who can't afford to be too particular in her other lovers.”

You frown. “Did you and Ar-”

“Campaign rules,” Porthos answers shortly, and, “Do you want this to stop?”

“... No.”

**

The Regiment has lost something, you sense: a flicker of reputation, a glow of charisma. The Royal Bodyguards no longer guard the King, and that is noticed. Athos, your new Captain, has little practice leading this many men, and that is noticed too.

You grin, your teeth very white, and do your part to show how the honed steel edge remains when the gilt has worn away. The unit tactics are different from the four man squads you used in peacetime - you and your men are versatile, able to fight hand to hand, fire ranks of muskets in long-drilled rapid fire, or mount light cavalry to skirmish around the edges like the wolves the Duke of Savoy once called you. You rip yourselves a reputation for hitting hard, and fast, and accurate, and soon enough the men in camp make a little space as you walk by, and the officers at staff meetings turn their heads when your Captain speaks.

**

The third time he presses a kiss to your temple, after. The fourth time, you return the favour.

**

You did not join the army to mess about with paperwork and stores.

Truly, you did not.

Soon enough you wish you'd paid more attention to your father's management of the high stony farm he'd kept, or even Constance’s keeping of the Bonacieux household - the one you'd ignored with the contempt of familiarity, too busy dreaming of chevaliers, the other you'd barely noticed, even as you'd carried her basket to market, far more interested in the precise shade of fire the bright sun had called out of her dark hair.   

Trailing after Porthos as he frets over the stores, the horseshoes and shoe leather and weapon oil and canvas and shot and powder - there's never enough powder - you realise something. Athos is a genius fighter and has a fine tactical mind. He inspires people. But Porthos? _He knows armies._    

**

When Athos’ third batman dies he does not appoint a new one, washing his own linen in the early morning when the mist rises from the ground and few are awake to see an officer tend his own gear. Black linen is pricy but it doesn't show the grime much, either. Sometime after the second time he quit drinking his neckerchief disappears; neither returns.

Porthos suggests you line your boots with tallow when your last woollen stockings fall apart. Quietly smug, he refuses to share any of his - he has an abundant supply from Lucie de Foix, who writes him regularly. You think she misses her brother, maybe.

**

It's early spring when Porthos brings in a hostage captured from the fighting, a Spanish grandee in severe black under the pigeon-breasted armour and with a disfiguring scar on a cheek like a craggy cliff.

Porthos grins from ear to ear as he offers the hospitality of the camp to the imperious gentleman, who criticises the food, the bedding, the inferiority of French horse-handling and the ever-present mud. It's two weeks spent waiting for the money which will secure his release; you get dragged in to translate every night with the pinch of Spanish you picked up from your grandmother, God rest her soul, as they play chess and casually insult each other's ancestry, ethics, hope of heaven, and ability to ride. You learn a lot of new words.

The grandee’s ransom buys a new horse and a custom set of armour for Porthos, who is always hard to fit; he spends hours with the armourer discussing the ornamentation of the breastplate, then frets over it for two more days before going back and adding fierce animals to the right pauldron in an aggressive jut.

The day he leaves, the grandee shoves a lacquered box in your hands. It's a travelling chess set. “For the Morisco,” he says, “and I'm so very sorry your heretical souls will burn.” Porthos waves cheerfully as he leaves, and bites into the last of the winter apples.

**

In four years you hear him speak the name one time, _once,_ when you pull him out of the Spanish fort in Alsace.

You followed Athos out of the hole in the underground, a few picked men behind you swarming like terriers into a rat warren. It's a time for cutting throats in the shadows, your band too few to make a pitched fight of it if the Spanish soldiers catch up, so you move swift and silent through the dark.

When you find him his right shoulder, the trick one, is dangling at a bad angle - the wrist still bound in iron - the other moves freely where he'd pulled the chain out of the wall and he swings it like a whip against the men who would beat him. There's blood running down his face. His great shoulders flex, a giant fit to bear the fortress on his shoulders. He roars like a wounded bull. “Aramis!” he cries. _“Aramis!”_

You get him back to camp and he sleeps for a week.

You don't talk about it.

**

You fret about Constance, sometimes. There's, oh, a month in the second year when all you can think about is whether she's found someone to keep her warm at night. She's a beautiful, passionate woman, none know better than you, and - you can't be the only man who noticed. And so you brood, images of her creamy limbs and the dark fire of her hair, the heat in her eyes…

“Treville?” you ask.

Porthos actually cackles. “Not Treville.”

“He's an honourable man.”

“Something like that. Look, mate, by the time you get back she's going to be a whole different person from who you married. An’ I'll bet hard money that you'll fall in love with that woman all over again.”

“Oh God, what if she won't love _me?_ What if I become some stranger she's leg-shackled to, an encumbrance in her bed, a -”

“Don't buy trouble, kid.” He tosses a damp rag at you, slick with soap. “Wash.”

“Why?”

“Because there's places I don't put my mouth without they're clean.”

**

You look up from Constance’s long and cheerful letter and say, “Lucie de Foix is getting married.”

“Yeah,” says Porthos, hands working slow and steady on the bridle he's oiling. “She wrote me last month; asked me to give her away.”

In a rare moment of subtlety you hold your tongue.

“All leave’s been cancelled so we can make the push north,” he says, quite low.

“Athos would let you go if you asked.”

“I can't.”

**

In the fourth year there's a time when you've lost too many horses to disease to work as cavalry, and your general is a fool who sends swordsmen marching against _cannon,_ and the powder is running out, and you're losing more men than you can bury...

You lie awake one night, in a cold bed, listening to rain on canvas and knowing that you will die tomorrow. It's inevitable, that's all. You think about Constance - her hair is so bright but can you truly remember her face? You love her, do you know her? You've seen such things, in the war. You've had brothers to fight beside.

You will die tomorrow. All you can do is find a proper place to do it. It's the way it is.

Serene with that knowledge you let yourself sleep, waking only with the birdcalls in the morning and Porthos crawling into your tent like a great muddy bear. Without a word you make space for him, and drift back to sleep with his forehead resting against your shoulder blades.

**

The four of you draw up your horses on a rise overlooking Paris. It's good to have Aramis lured back from the skirts of his God. The man wears no doublet or coat; his white shirt billows, shapeless in the breeze. Athos sits still on Roger, a warhorse near his last days of service, his face that familiar mix of serene and grim as he studies the city.

Constance is waiting for you.

Porthos opens a bottle -  with his hands this time, not a sword - and takes a swig.

“An acceptable vintage,” he says.

**Author's Note:**

> Some of those letters were delivered by nervous baby cadets looking for "Madame d'Artagnan's husband." Just saying.
> 
> This makes an odd kind of bookend to my Girl!d'Artagnan/Aramis story, I guess, trying as it does to work out how the relationship could fit in canon and it being a bit more involved than the strictly casual they claim it to be.
> 
> The "I'm so sorry you'll burn in hell" line was purloined from the novel "Miss Haroun all Rashid."


End file.
